Recently, in public transportation units such as buses, taxies, railway vehicles represented by a train, or the like, a monitoring system including monitoring cameras or the like operates inside and/or outside a vehicle. Further, it is general to monitor and record (store) a state inside a vehicle by using images in order to prevent crime, nuisance or the like inside a vehicle. The introduction of the monitoring system into the railway vehicle makes it possible to monitor the inside of the train by the monitoring camera and also possible to record or store the image of the inside of the train.
For example, there is disclosed a system that allows information such as images or the like to be communicated between vehicles by a network switch installed in each vehicle and determines a congestion rate of each vehicle based on images captured by the monitoring camera installed in each vehicle (see Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2013-025523).
In the above-described system, the communication between vehicles is realized by the monitoring network in which network monitoring devices installed in respective vehicles are connected via network switches and generally a control apparatus for controlling the monitoring network is installed. A train formation may include a plurality of vehicles such as a driver cabin, a passenger cabin and the like connected to each other. The respective vehicles may require different network devices. In that case, the control apparatus may be installed only in some vehicles and. Further, one or more control apparatuses may be installed in one train formation. If only one control apparatus is installed in the train formation, there is no problem. However, if two or more control apparatuses are installed in the train formation, it means that multiple control systems exist therein, so that it is necessary to consistently determine a control system uniformly.